


only the sun (has come this close)

by carfucker



Category: Cars (Pixar Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Bodyswap, Doc is 70 Lightning is 30, First Kiss, Humanized Cars (Pixar Movies), M/M, POV Alternating, POV Second Person, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:08:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27120016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carfucker/pseuds/carfucker
Summary: Your body hasn’t felt this whole in years. Decades, even. You think you’re dreaming at first, even though it’s been so long that you don’t even have concrete enough memories to conjure up something like this. Feeling young, feeling good. Not hurting.You pinch yourself. It hurts, and you don’t wake up, so you do it again. Harder. And it still doesn’t work and now you’re really panicking. You stumble your way down the hall in a body that’s too large and awkward to move in, like a suit that doesn’t fit right.(aka the docmcqueen bodyswap!AU that changes everything)
Relationships: Doc Hudson/Lightning McQueen
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	only the sun (has come this close)

**Author's Note:**

> *shows up seven months late with starbucks*

Your body hasn’t felt this whole in years.  _ Decades,  _ even. You think you’re dreaming at first, even though it’s been so long that you don’t even have concrete enough memories to conjure up something like this. Feeling young, feeling  _ good.  _ Not hurting. No dead nerves anywhere on your body.

This is what wakes you up from the dream that isn’t actually a dream. This is the moment your eyes fly open and you look down and realize  _ this is not my body. _ That is not your chest, your stomach, your bulge. You lift your hands, except they aren’t your hands. They’re smaller, the fingers slimmer, and when you clench those small and slim fingers into a fist you know whose body this is.

At this point, you know three things: you’re in the body of Lightning McQueen, you’re not dreaming, and you’re willing to ignore the second one as a means to justify the gratuitous way you can’t stop touching him. You. His body. Whatever. 

Muscle memory guides your hand to your bedside drawer, gets your fingers slick and wet and ready to explore and you should stop. You should really stop, except you’re never going to get another chance like this, so before you can fully talk yourself out of it, you’re slipping a finger up Lightning McQueen’s virgin hole and biting your lip so hard you taste copper. 

The sensation is strange, like you’re being penetrated and doing the penetrating at the same time, and it feels so  _ good  _ that not even the fear of being walked in on makes you stop. 

The guilt, however, will hit you soon. 

And it does, right after you’ve come all over his stomach, as your touch it and smear it into his pubic hair. The shame takes over, and you want to cry except the only thing worse than the guilt is the thought of hearing him cry. Even if it’s not really him. Your heart can’t take it. Nevermind that you aren’t in control of  _ your  _ heart at the moment. So you play with the come that isn’t your come, and you inspect the body that isn’t your body, and you wait for something else to happen. 

You don’t have to wait long before there’s a muffled thump and a yelp that sounds strangely familiar and yet completely out of place from down the hall, a sign that Lightning has woken up and unless there’s now two of him in the world, he’s just made the same discovery as you. That you’re in his body, and he’s presumably in yours, and this is hands down the weirdest thing you’ve woken up to in your life. Which is saying something, really, because you’ve been alive for a while, you’ve woken up a lot of times. You’ve woken up to plenty of weird.

That doesn’t make you feel any better. Not that you thought it would.    


There’s more thumping and more yelping, and you realize that you’re naked and this looks bad, but you’ve forgotten how to move, unfortunately. Trapped like a fly in a spider’s web, heart pounding as you hear his footsteps grow closer, and at the very last second you manage to yank the sheets up over your lower half, and sit up and you wait for the inevitable confrontation.

**~*~**

You don’t know what to do. 

You don’t know what to  _ do.  _ All you know is that you need to find Doc to make it better the way he always does. Except that’s you? Maybe? Or there’s two Doc’s and you’re trapped inside one of them. Or this is a really fucked up dream and you never actually left Mater’s last night and this is a result of sleeping in his barn and inhaling some weird chemicals or something. Because this can’t be happening. This  _ can’t be happening. _

You pinch yourself. It hurts, and you don’t wake up, so you do it again. Harder. And it still doesn’t work and now you’re really panicking. You stumble your way down the hall in a body that’s too large and awkward to move in, like a suit that doesn’t fit right, and all you can think is  _ Doc can fix this. I just need to find Doc and then everything will be okay. _

It doesn’t occur to you that you aren’t the only one to wake up in the wrong body until you’re crashing through Doc’s bedroom door and faced with the sight of yourself sitting in his bed. There’s a thin sheet covering the lower half of his - your? - body and you have a little crisis because you can’t remember if you wore boxers to bed or not, but it dies quickly in the face of a much bigger and far more urgent crisis. It’s hard to breathe, and you don’t know if this is normal for Doc or if you’re having one of those panic attacks you get sometimes. Either way, you need to get it under control, like, right now. 

Only you can’t breathe, everything is too hot and the room feels like it’s spinning, and the person in the bed who you’re only now  _ assuming  _ is Doc is frowning at you. You can’t say anything, you’re still breathing too hard, and he’s wrapping the sheet around his waist (which answers  _ that  _ question) and moving towards the edge of the bed. 

“Hey, kid, don’t pass out on me,” he says, and now you’re  _ sure  _ it’s Doc and also he sounds worried, and he sounds like  _ you _ , which  _ does not help at all.  _ But you try to breathe, try to calm your racing heart. It feels like you’re having a heart attack, which is not a new occurrence for you, except now you’re worried you could have an  _ actual  _ heart attack. You don’t even know if that’s  _ possible _ , you should ask Doc, except just the act of  _ looking at your own face  _ sends you into a new panic spiral. You don’t trust yourself to speak. 

You sit down, because your legs are shaky, and they  _ hurt _ . Everything hurts, really, some places more than others. You don’t want to dwell on the fact that Doc apparently walks around with this pain  _ all the time.  _ It makes your throat go a bit gooey and thick if you think too hard about that. About all the ways he must struggle, while you run him ragged and don’t even think twice about it. 

You feel horrible, you feel guilty, you feel selfish, you feel…

Hungry. You feel hungry. You need to eat something, and quick. Except you’re not sure you can keep anything down, honestly, which is what keeps you sitting, keeps you quiet, keeps the worried expression on Doc’s face that isn’t really Doc’s face. 

Your stomach betrays you, growling loudly, and you honestly didn’t know you could raise your eyebrow that like, that you could even make that expression Doc is currently molding your face into, and it isn’t doing anything to curb your panic. 

“Lightning,” he says, which is what he calls you when things are serious, “you need to breathe, we need to eat something, sit down and figure this—” He stops mid-sentence and snorts. “How do you get anyone to take you seriously with this voice?” 

“Hey,” you protest, something that would normally border on whiny, except it’s impossible to sound like that with your new voice.  _ Doc’s voice.  _ “Hey,” you say again, just to test it out, and it’s just as gravely, just as  _ deep  _ as the first time. You could get used to this, honestly. 

(This is a lie.)

“Holy hell,” he says, “that’s weird.”

You laugh but nothing is funny. “Yeah.”

“You gonna be okay?”

You shrug your shoulders because you honestly don’t know. Your stomach growls again, which hurts and manages to finally distract you from the panic long enough to let your breathing even out somewhat. Even that feels different. Breathing. Each inhale and exhale is foreign which makes no sense, except nothing makes sense this morning, so it’s on par for the course you figure. 

“You be careful with that body,” he jokes, and it still isn’t funny, but you laugh again anyway. 

“I’ll try,” you say.

(Doc’s voice makes everything you say sound like the truth.)

You find yourself in the kitchen, frying up breakfast because you don’t know what else to do. You needed something to do with your hands; a distraction. Doc ambles in - fuck, do you always walk like that? - as you start the bacon, and he sniffs the air appreciatively. At least, you think it’s appreciative; it’s not like you spend much time studying your own facial expressions in the mirror, or something. 

(Well, not that particular one.)

“Hope you didn’t get any ideas and take a peek or something,” he says as he kicks out a chair and sits down heavily, and you snort. A sound both familiar and unfamiliar to your ears. You wonder if you’ll get used to this soon. 

“Like you’re one to talk,” you say as he picks up the paper and before you lose his attention to it. “You think I don’t know the smell of my own spunk?” The word sounds foreign on Doc’s tongue. You kind of like it. 

It’s weird to see what you look like when you blush from the perspective of another person. Or like, at all really. It’s not like you check yourself out in the mirror when you’re doing something as embarrassing as  _ blushing _ . 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, he  _ lies _ , and fuck you were sort of joking but he looks  _ guilty _ . You’re no longer hungry for breakfast; instead you want to know what he did. To  _ you.  _ You wonder how it felt. You wonder how  _ you _ felt. 

The oil in the pan pops and tiny droplets splatter across your stomach, making you hiss - yet  _ another  _ unfamiliar sound. 

Speaking of unfamiliar things…

“Pretty sure I’ve never read the paper in my  _ life _ ,” you say as he shakes out the paper in front of himself. “Looks weird, you holding it like that.”

“That’s weird to you? Out of everything that’s happened since you woke up this morning, you find the sight of yourself reading the paper weird?”

“Well, yeah. Plus you’re still doing it, like, yourself? Makes it weirder, like you’re in my— I mean I guess you are, huh.”

There goes the eyebrow again, and you’ve really got to get him to show you how to do that when you get switched back. (Assuming that ever happens, of course.) (This is not a thought you allow yourself to dwell on.)

The oil pops again, sounding more insistent this time, and you turn your full attention back to the task. He reads the paper quietly while you finish, only looking up when you finish plating it all and set it in front of him. 

“Jesus, kid,” he says, and it shouldn’t make your stomach drop. “Are you expecting anyone else this morning?” he goes on. “You’ve made enough for an army.”

You blush. “I, uh. I guess I wasn’t really paying attention.” You reach your arm up to scratch the back of your head self-consciously, only you can’t because it  _ hurts _ . You can’t bite back your gasp of surprise quick enough, and you can see the exact moment Doc clocks what’s happened. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes - your eyes - say plenty. You don’t know what to say back, so you sit down to eat even though you aren’t hungry.

“Can I have the comics?” you ask, because you need something to do with your hands again.

His expression doesn’t change, though his eyes flick over in your direction, if only for a second. “Thought you didn’t read the paper.”

“Comics don’t count,” you insist, but it still doesn’t sound whiny. You wonder if he’s interpreting the same way if it’ll work, and then he’s handing you the comics but when you shift to take them your stomach growls again, perhaps the loudest this time, and he snatches them back.

“Food first, then comics.”

You frown. “That’s not fair, you aren’t eating.”

“I’m also not the one doing a grizzly impression, am I?”

You shake your head, and he goes back to his paper. You start to eat because he wants you to, and you apparently still do everything Doc tells you to even when he’s wearing your face. You shove a forkful of eggs in your mouth so you don’t have to think about that too hard. 

“You got anywhere to be today?” he asks over the top of the paper, and it still looks too damn  _ weird.  _ He manages to make you look  _ old.  _ Only it doesn’t suit you like it suits him, which probably makes sense somehow, but whatever. 

You shake your head again, mouth too full of toast and eggs now to respond properly.

“Good, me neither. Was thinking about popping by the clinic, but I reckon they’ll be glad to have me out of their hair.” He chuckles, a fairly calm sound compared to the noise of distress you barely fight back, the one that manifests itself as some sort of weird throat-clearing cough meets hiccup. You can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to have Doc around. You can’t fathom a universe where he would believe this to be true.

“I wouldn’t know what to do anyway,” you admit after your world stops reeling and you digest the fact that maybe Doc really _ doesn’t  _ see the way people gravitate towards him, the way he can command attention just by entering a room in a quiet and cool way you only wish you could. Suave. All classic Hollywood aged good looks and sage advice and  _ fuck _ . 

He’s answered, apparently, but you missed it. 

You miss the rest of breakfast too, somehow. You only know it’s over because your plate is clean and Doc’s looking at you funny. Well, funnier. And still with your face. 

He stands, and you should too, because this is your routine, this is what you do. You should stand and clear your plate and ignore the nagging pain that’s just started in your knee. You should be doing absolutely anything else, and yet you can’t help but look up, catch his gaze,  _ hold his gaze _ , and the world stops. You shouldn’t do it, not now,  _ especially not now.  _ His eyes -  _ your eyes  _ \- are regarding you curiously, and you  _ know you shouldn’t do it.  _ You shouldn’t reach for him, shouldn’t touch his face, shouldn’t  _ want him.  _

And then you do.   
  


Doc grabs your face, looking lost, like he’s  _ begging _ . “Please,” he says, as if to confirm,  _ “please.”  _ Then, without waiting for a response, when you’ve barely had time to think  _ oh fuck is this really happening?  _ before it happens, he’s devouring your mouth like he’s a starved man. And you let him. And you let him and you let him and you  _ let him.  _ You don’t want it to stop, and your heart sinks to your stomach when, as abruptly as you pulled you close, he pushes you away and wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. Like he’s trying to  _ wash you off of him.  _ It hurts. Oh god, it  _ hurts.  _ You didn’t think it would hurt, and yet. And  _ yet.  _

You want him to kiss you again. You want to kiss him again, but you don’t want to be the one to initiate it. In case he rejects you, in case he pulls back, says  _ no.  _ Looks at you with  _ pity _ . It might actually kill you. So you stay still, and you  _ suffer.  _

**~*~**

You take a step back, away from Lightning. You try to regain control before realizing you don’t  _ want to be in control _ , and you dive back in. Only you miss this time, you catch the corner of his mouth, and it’s mortifying, you think of something to say to show you meant to… That you didn’t make a mistake, but you don’t get a chance because Lightning’s leaning down and he’s catching your mouth with his, and never in your whole damn life did you think you’d know what it was like to kiss your own lips, and  _ yet.  _

You have to lean against each other when you both pull back then, because the world is spinning and neither of you can breathe yet, and you’re more than a little bit lightheaded, actually. 

“We should sit down,” you say, and he nods. 

Your forehead is pressed to his, you’re sharing breath before one of you - you honestly aren’t sure who moves first - dives back in for more. You thought you were done with this, but you were  _ wrong.  _ You were  _ so wrong _ and when you finally pull apart again, you’re shocked by his loud panting until you realize that it’s actually  _ you  _ making the noise, and you groan because it’s still his voice, and it still makes you hard. 

He kisses at your eyelids and your nose before finally sealing the deal, pressing what starts off as a series of chaste kisses against your lips that quickly turn dirty.

Tentative fingers slowly grow bolder, attached to hands that should feel familiar here, but the knowledge that they  _ aren’t _ , that this is nothing like touching yourself furtively in the dark because it’s your hands but they’re also Lightning’s hands. It’s then that you’re hit with the reminder that Lightning must be feeling the same, because it’s his own cock he’s stroking, staring at almost reverently, and you’re certain you won’t - you  _ can’t  _ \- last much longer.   
  


When it’s over, when you’ve come and he’s come, and you’re spooning him even though he’s taller, and you’re lying on the wet spot, you don’t even  _ care _ . You should, probably. Not about the wet spot, but maybe about what this all  _ means _ . And a little bit about how it all  _ happened _ , why you woke up like this and he woke up like that, and you proceeded to fulfill all your deepest, darkest fantasies in the most ironic of ways.

For now, though, you don’t feel like thinking. Instead, you kiss the back of his neck. You could kiss the back of his neck forever, you think, if he’d let you. If you were  _ allowed.  _ The thought, the very  _ idea,  _ sends a curious shiver up your spine. It’s another new sensation to add to all the ones you’ve learned about today. 

That’s what seals the deal for you, really. That’s how you know you’ll never be able to recover, to get over him. Even if you wake up tomorrow and everything’s back to normal, you won’t be. Touching him is like touching a plate after being told it’s hot because your curiosity is greater than your sense of self-preservation. Your conscience is telling you  _ careful  _ and  _ don’t burn yourself _ and you ignore it, barrel on full speed ahead straight into the sun. You won’t survive this, but being reduced to ashes is a small price to pay for the opportunity, for the privilege, for the freedom to act on all of your most pent-up desires. 

Eventually, his breathing evens out, and you listen to the gentle inhales and exhales and let them lull you to sleep as well. You think you press a final kiss to the back of his neck before that, but the line between dreams and reality has become so blurred that you’re really not certain. 

No one is awake to prove anything anyway, and as your lips brush the papery skin there,  _ your skin _ that you’ve tasted more times in the last 12 or so hours than you have in the last 70 years, you wonder what tomorrow will bring. Will you still be in the wrong bodies? Will you wake up to find Lightning McQueen still here, in your bed, fast asleep, and drooling on your pillow? Will either of you remember today happened?  _ Did  _ today even happen?

You finally fall asleep with a mind still bursting with questions, and Lightning McQueen still in your arms, and the utmost certainty that you will never,  _ ever _ , be able to let go.

**~*~**

You’re only awake enough to know you’re back in your own body, still sleepy enough not to care how or why, and content enough to let yourself be held by Doc. It’s different from last night when you were the one holding  _ him.  _ and you’d been bigger, a literal big spoon and you wonder if he’d allow that to happen now that you’re small again. 

  
  


**~*~**

He’s still the sun, you will still get burned, but you have never known a closeness like this before. So you hold him, and he lets you, and he’s everywhere,  _ everywhere  _ \- life has taught you that this is when you leave, that you can’t let boys like Lightning get to close, that you’ve got to keep your distance. But now… Now, you’ve been inside him - in more ways than one - and you can’t tear yourself away. You might not survive this, might barely last the weak, but the risk- God, the  _ risk.  _

You’ve never been more sure before. You’ve never been this close. 

(You’ve never wanted to be, before  _ him _ .)

So you keep holding him, this solar flare disguised as a boy. You keep on holding him, and you smell his sweat, kiss his shoulders, test the way his chest hair feels under your fingertips, and when he wakes up you let him kiss you and you don’t even care that his breath is just as stale as yours likely is. You kiss him and he kisses you and you kiss him, and you haven’t caught fire yet. 

Nothing’s been promised in the light of day, but he’s still kissing you, still letting you hold him, and maybe that’s enough. Enough to convince you he’s still as lovely close up as he is from far away, enough to prove that it’s possible for him to actually want you, and enough to make you believe in miracles. So you make your own promise, so you vow to keep it.

(So you stay.)

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr post](https://carfucker95.tumblr.com/post/632505137053728768/only-the-sun-has-come-this-closeyour-body-hasnt)


End file.
